Other Search Engines

There are many search engines available now. Below are a few examples of some of the search engines that are currently being used with brief information on how they are powered.

Lycos

Lycos is one of the older search engines. It was originally launched in 1994 and grew very rapidly. However, the company began to focus on more personal services, including chat rooms, shopping and informative pages which led to its demise as a leading search engine.

During recent years Lycos has switched from its own search technology to the improved ‘FAST’ search engine. FAST is an acronym of Fast Search and Transfer. FAST also operate Alltheweb.

Alta Vista

Alta Vista is another of the older, more established search engines that has lost ground to the more recent entrants. However, in 2003 Overture purchased the company and we await news of their future plans.

Inkotomi

The Inkotomi search engine powers many of the other search engines that are regularly used. AOL, MSN, iWON and Hotbot all use the Inkotomi search engine to provide their results.
However MSN are soon to launch their own search engine. It is believed that MSN may at last be taking the fight to Google.

Other Directories

There are a growing number of search engines and directories available on the web. Results are often sourced from existing search engines and paid for listings. By registering with directories like Overture and Espotting you can ensure listing in other directories. However, when customers click through to your site there is a pre-determined fee per click through.
With so many different search engines available the question is raised of how to get your site included in their listings. Whilst many of the search engines allow for sites to be submitted there is one way to get listed in most of the search engines without spending any money. Get your site crawled.
Once the spiders crawl a listed site with a link to your site most of the search engines will read and index your site.